


The Spectrum of Visible Light

by gnimmish



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 17:58:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8219956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: Barry Allen is awed by her. No pressure. Barry and Iris fumble awkwardly into the best thing that has ever happened to them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> If Zoom had never turned up to murder Barry's father in 2x22, and Iris and Barry had been able to carry on after their 'let's give this a shot' conversation, I like to think it would have gone like this - picking up directly after that conversation, with no pesky supervillainous intervention.

Under the table at dinner, Barry’s hand brushes her knee, and for one breathless moment Iris isn’t sure whether it’s an accident or not – then he does it again, with the back of his hand, knuckles just grazing her thigh, where no one else can see.

Iris keeps her gaze on her plate, feeling her face grow hot as his hand just… rests there, deliberate and sure. It’s a cotton-soft kind of a touch, light enough that if she didn’t want it there she could dislodge it with a twitch.

But Iris doesn’t twitch.

She chances a sideways glance at him from under her eyelashes – he’s pretending to pay attention to something Cisco is saying across the table – and then she covers his little finger with her own and sees him freeze for a fraction of a second and jerk his head toward her. His mouth makes this quick, silent quirk, eyes crinkling up at the edges. For a heartbeat they are alone in the room, having an entire conversation – _this? Here? Now? Yes? This. Let’s have this. You and me –_ through the points where their fingers connect against her thigh, where no one can see.

It sets something humming in the back of Iris’s head, low and sweet. She heard it when her father first told her about _Iris West-Allen_ – she heard it when Barry mentioned their otherworldly dopplegangers; she heard it when she realised she didn’t want to be on a date with Scott. Still, it’s such a familiar sensation that she knows it’s been there for years. It’s just now that she’s hearing it, like someone turned up the volume. Like she’s only just now learning it amongst all the other noise her head generates daily, beginning to see the way that it’s the wallpaper, the furniture, all the regular punctuation points that make her mind work – trod in there, like grain in wood, is how she feels about Barry. Has always felt.

He holds onto her little finger for a full ten minutes, whilst dinner goes on around them like nothing has changed. Iris even manages to stay relatively engaged with Wally on one side of her and Caitlin opposite, like her heart isn’t half way in her throat, like Barry’s holding onto her doesn’t feel like the world right now. Like a universe isn’t blooming into brilliant possibility between them.

Until Cisco’s enthusiastic gesticulations knock a glass of wine flying and Barry lurches and snatches it out of the air before it can shatter, although not before its content has spilled on the table cloth and begun pool on the floor. Iris volunteers to get a cloth.

+++  
  
“So um,” Barry lingers on the porch after everyone else has gone home – Wally and Joe are in the kitchen, clearing up. Iris leans against the closed front door, enjoying the warm night air, the distant sounds of the city… enjoys Barry, hovering, attentive, like he doesn’t want to leave her orbit yet. “Do you wanna do something? Tomorrow?”

“Something?” Iris glances away, pretends he didn’t spend ten whole minutes holding her little finger under the table at dinner like they were middle schoolers, or that he didn’t stroke her thigh or nudge her foot when she got back with a cloth for Cisco’s spilled wine. Maybe he didn’t spend the whole of desert stealing glances at her over the ice cream, who knows?

“Dinner?” Barry has thrust both hands into his pockets and is scuffing his shoes on the porch tiles. “Like a date?”

“Just – _like_ a date?” Iris quirks one teasing eyebrow, swallowing the flash of nerves that they seem to actually be having this conversation now. “Or, you know, an actual date?”

“The actual kind,” Barry affirms, rubbing the back of his neck. “The date – kind of – date. Dinner.”

“Right.”

“Unless –“ Barry staggers on, apparently grasping for some way to make this more awkward, “you wanted to do something else? I just – I mean, dinner’s the obvious choice – even though – it’s not much different than… than what we normally… it’s just we pretty much already do everything people who are dating do so –“

“Well, not everything,” Iris points out, before she can stop herself, and sees Barry flush and feels herself get a little giddy. God, this is weird, and dumb, and nice.

“Yeah I mean,” Barry shuffles his feet and meets her gaze for a moment, “we can work on that.”

Iris can’t help her own smile, the blood rushing to her face, that low, sweet hum in the back of her head, as Barry laughs self-consciously and scuffs from one foot to the other in the stretching silence. _They’ll work on that._

“Dinner. Tomorrow.” She proffers, “that’d be nice.”

“Right, yeah, okay,” Barry nods, vigorously. “Um – there’s a new sushi place just opened up near the precinct that I kept meaning to try but…”

“But you’ve been a little busy saving the world?”

Barry shrugs, smiles quick and small. “You’d be surprised how much of your spare time that takes up.”

Iris resists a sudden warm urge to reach for him, stroke her hands through his hair – he looks so tired, and so relieved, that this is all over and they’re all safe and she’s here with him. She wouldn’t mind just putting her arms around him for a second, letting him rest. He wouldn’t mind it either. But if she does that now she’s not going to be able to stop, and her dad and brother are both barely five feet and one house wall away.

“Okay,” she agrees, instead of reaching for him, “sushi. But you’re taking me for ice cream afterwards, too.”

“Done.” Barry’s smile is brighter this time, easy and real – Iris basks in it for a moment, in that expression directed at her without the bleak shade of guardedness left between them. “You want me to pick you up after work?”

“Sure.”

And somehow, it’s that easy.

+++  
  
Late that night, curled up in bed, Iris thinks about kissing Barry Allen. She thinks about where he’ll put his hands and how he’ll feel pressed against her, the long lean muscular heat of him. She lets her mind skitter over the possibility of clothes and skin and fingers _exploring_ – she thinks about his hands between her thighs, and then his mouth on her throat and down her chest and lower and lower…

+++

Barry spills soy sauce on his shirt, and the pickled ginger makes him cough and the restaurant gets at least one of their orders wrong because it’s crowded and service is slow and shaky.

Later, Iris barely remembers any of those details. What she remembers is this:

Barry waiting outside Picture News, with his hair combed and his hands in his pockets, wearing what she’s fairly sure is a new shirt, his expression nervous and then warm at the sight of her. Barry telling her she looks nice, coming off just a little shy, his smile crooked and his gaze genuinely admiring – Barry looking at her all the way to the restaurant and how it felt prickly and sweet at the same time.

Barry’s hand in hers as they walk. Barry doing an impression of her dad that makes her laugh. Barry offering to hold her bag and coat, which is what he always does, but this somehow feels different now, charged, significant. Barry talking away about some new chemical process for analysing DNA, illustrating the structures of the molecules involved in the air with his hands, animated and pleased with himself. Barry asking about her day, and nodding as she talks, and looking at her as if the irritating minutae of office drama and journalistic ethics are up there with psychic gorillas and alternative universes.

Barry being so exactly himself, so familiar, so safe, that Iris forgets to feel nervous until they are outside again, looking for ice cream.

“I have an idea,” he tells her, leaning down to murmur into her ear in a way that’s intimate and conspiratorial and makes her want to turn her head and kiss his stupid face, “do you trust me?”

“Always,” she replies, honestly, and suddenly they are on the roof at Jitters’, where they are definitely not meant to be after closing – she doesn’t even work there anymore, for god’s sake. But Barry looks so smug she realises he has absolutely planned this. There’s a blanket and candles and a space heater and a cooler – containing yes, ice cream – already up here, and everything.

“Pretty smooth, Allen,” she taps him on the chest, feeling fluttery and pleased and – no one’s ever done anything like this for her before.

Barry shrugs, pretending modesty, though she can see how red his ears are even by the candle light.

The sun is dipping low over the city. They sit on the blanket and watch it bleed cotton candy pink and bright scarlet, gold and lavender across the horizon, less talking now, because for all this is their place – their history – this feels like less familiar territory than the restaurant was.

Barry knows what makes those colours, Iris remembers – he explained it to her once, when they were kids. She wants to ask him to go through it for her again, but somehow interrupting the quiet feels like a scary thing now. Their legs are touching on the blanket, their fingers within grasping distance if Iris could pluck up the courage to reach across the inch gap between them.

He has brought her mint chocolate chip ice cream and chocolate syrup, and chocolate fudge brownie as a backup, because he knows her that well. But Iris is letting hers melt because Barry is going to kiss her on this rooftop. She knows he is. You don’t bring a girl somewhere secluded to watch the sun set, replete with candles and blankets and her favourite ice cream, if you’re not planning to kiss her, like, a lot, in the immediate future. And she needs him to get to it because right now she’s so nervous she feels faintly sick.

She wants him to kiss her so badly it feels like the want is physically pressing up under her skin, reaching for him. Wanting him. But he’s not looking at her – he seems about as stuck as she feels, nerves coming off him in waves.

“Tell me about the sunset,” she manages, her voice sounding strange to her own ears, making Barry glance at her abruptly (his ice cream is melting too, Iris realises).

“Sunset?”

“The colours – what makes the light go those colours. You know about it, I know you do.”

“Um, sure,” Barry smiles, quick and jittery, then leans a little closer to her, inch-gap closing, and points at the place where the sun is all but liquid gold now. “It’s to do with the spectrum of visible light waves scattered by atmospheric gas molecules. See, red light is scattered the least, and from where we are in relation to the sun and the curve of the Earth now, the light has to travel a longer and longer path to reach our eyes so – ”

And Iris kisses him. (Patience has never really been her thing).

Barry goes still, and then soft, and grasps her hand where it lays on the blanket between them, and kisses her back. The press of his mouth is warm, the little part of his lips tastes faintly of sake and soy sauce and this close he smells powerfully of what is probably his dad’s aftershave. When they part, Iris can’t tell if it’s her hand shaking or his. She doesn’t let go of it, anyway.

“Oh,” Barry murmurs, glancing down self-consciously.

“I – sorry –“ Iris swallows a nervous urge to giggle.

“Don’t apologise,” Barry’s gaze comes up to hers again, full of sincerity now, and Iris feels her heart kick up against her rips at the way he’s looking at her.

He leans a little closer again, and Iris wonders why the hell he’s still being so hesitant when all she really wants is for him to hold her close and promise never to let her go and has she not made that abundantly clear lately – ?

Barry’s mouth brushes hers and her mind goes bright gold and blank – she can feel the tip of his tongue, and when she grasps the collar of his shirt to pull him to the right angle he nips at her bottom lip and – that, she wants more of that. And for a moment they’re lingering there in the strange, precious quiet pooling around them, the sunset turning to twilight, Barry’s hand coming to rest on her thigh, their noses touching – Iris could swear she can feel his eyelashes.

She lets go of his hand to bring it up to his jaw, stroking back until she’s running her fingers through his hair.

“Bear-“ She manages, at the exact same moment as he says _Iris_ , in a voice that’s low and choked with something, her name coming out like a promise, like a prayer, murmured against her cheek.

And then he’s kissing her again, and again, his lips fumbling and soft but not hesitant anymore, and as she presses forward against him, he wraps his arm around her waist to anchor her there.

+++  
  
They lie on the roof together, on the blanket, Iris pillowing her head on Barry’s chest, long after the last ray of sunlight has bled from the sky and there is only the muggy orange-on-black glow of a cityscape at night, stars faintly visible, moon drifting amongst shadowy clouds. Barry always runs hot these days – something to do with that super-speed metabolism – and Iris doesn’t get cold huddled against his side, his arms around her, breathing into her hair while they talk. His fingers keep drawing listless spirals around her back and Iris keeps imagining what that would feel like on her bare skin.

“We should go home,” she tells him, sometime close to midnight.

“Yeah,” Barry agrees. “We’d have to move to do that, though.”

“Yeah,” she shifts a little glance into his face. “I mean, I guess.”

Barry smiles. “Kinda inconvenient when that happens, huh?”

Iris shifts a little, so she can kiss him, because that’s a thing she can do now – cradling his jaw, stroking his hair, feeling his arm around her waist, and sucking on his bottom lip like she’s going to drink him all up right there. He makes a sound under her, low and appreciative deep in his chest, and… none of this is making her more inclined to move.

They touch noses for a moment, and Barry’s smile is half an inch from Iris’s own while his fingers are making little circles against the nape of her neck, and Iris could stay like this forever, world-ending cataclysms not withstanding.

“Gonna take this as confirmation that I may have scored myself another date,” Barry murmurs, and Iris likes how he sounds: dumb and smug and happy. She kisses his jaw for good measure.

+++

Wally eyes her over lunch the next day. “Can I have whatever you’re on?”

“Mm?”

“You look like it’s some good stuff.”

“You shush, Wally West,” she prods him with her foot under the table, and he laughs.

“Date with Barry went pretty well last night huh?”

“That is so none of your business.”

“Hey, I’m not asking for details here, believe me,” Wally holds up his hands. “Just sayin’… nice to see you smiling.”

Wally’s a real cutiepie when he wants to be – not that Iris is ever, ever going to tell him that. Except maybe in front of some girl when she wants to needle him a little. “So how’s Jesse?”

“Jesse?”

“Yeah she seemed a little cosy with you at dinner.”

“You shush, Iris West,” and he mimics her little head quirk so accurately that he has to get her a glass of water she laughs so hard.

+++  
  
Second date is dinner and a movie – which Barry and Iris miss most of because as soon as the lights go down in the theatre Iris climbs into Barry’s lap and neither of them are paying attention to a damn thing outside of each other for the rest of the night.

It’s just – new. And sweet and nice and _Barry is good_ at the kissing thing – she’s not sure if he’s just always been good or if it’s her or – he just seems good because she likes him so much – but. Now they’ve started kissing it’s kind of hard not to be kissing all the time. Any given moment, the minute the opportunity presents itself – kissing.  

Iris has a hard time justifying not taking Barry home with her, after the movie theatre, but it’s Thursday and she has to get up for work tomorrow and they have time, now, they can wait –

Still, when Barry runs her back to her place they stand on the front step for a good five minutes, wrapped up in each other, Barry’s shoulders stooped to accommodate her, his mouth warm and fervent against her neck, Iris’s fingers traveling unconsciously to the belt of his jeans.

Then the front door of the building rattles as one of her neighbours opens it to exit and they jump apart like they’ve been doing something wrong. The guy brushes past them both with barely a glance, but Iris still finds herself meeting Barry’s sheepish gaze in the dim light coming off the street a few feet away.

“Good night, Bear.”

“Night,” he murmurs, rubbing the back of his neck, with her foundation smeared all over his face – and if she asked him to come up with her he would, and if he asked if he could stay she would let him, and if she undressed him he’d like it, but – but –

Six AM start tomorrow. Deadlines. Work.

Iris takes a deep breath to clear her head of the hazy feel of Barry wrapped around her, and the dizzying sense of how much has changed between them in a week, and pushes through her front door without him.

She lies in bed on her own that night and thinks about him, and somehow it’s not a surprise when he texts her at 2AM.

_You’re amazing. Just fyi. :)_  
  
He’s awake and thinking about her too, and trying to be cute. At 2AM. Iris clutches her phone in the dark and considers her response.

The problem with having a – she hasn’t used the word outloud yet but – _boyfriend_ , with speedster abilities, is that if she told him to come round he could be in her room in thirty seconds. Probably less.

He could be in her room in _his speed-suit_ , which would be… yeah.

In his speed-suit and pulling off her pyjamas and running his fingers in those red leather gloves of his up her thighs and down her chest and…

(Somewhere in the back of her head she can hear Cisco correcting her – _they’re not leather, they’re made of a heat-resistant breathable micro-fabric_ –)

(They sure as hell feel like leather. That is to say, they feel good. Not that Iris has touched very much of the speedsuit yet – not the way she’d kinda like to. Is that kinky? It’s probably a little kinky.)

She texts him back: _Shh. I’m asleep._

+++  
  
They have dinner at her dad’s place on Friday nights – it’s kind of a standing thing; not always Fridays, but sometime between Friday and Sunday, between Joe’s days on-call and Barry saving the world and Iris’s deadlines, they try to find time to sit down, and eat, and remember that they are a family held together by something other than crisis management.

Iris is still thinking about the feel of Barry’s mouth on her neck when she encounters him on the porch of their childhood home and realises he’s been waiting for her outside.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” he straightens and smiles at her, thrusting his hands into his pockets. He looks good in his own easy, familiar way – shirt creased and hair ruffled, the old tennis shoes she knows are falling apart but for some reason he refuses to replace.

She takes the stairs two at a time into his personal space, wraps her arms around his waist – he smells like he did last night. “Hi.”

He buries his face in her hair. “You said that already.”

“I wanted to say it again.”

“Evidentially.”

He should let go of her so they can go inside, but he doesn’t and Iris is in no hurry to make him. It’s too nice – touching him so much is still a novelty, not needing an excuse to wrap him up and hold him close. His hands smooth along her back, squeezing her gently, kissing her temple.

“Good day?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Iris leans against him, contentedly, “you?”

“Boring,” Barry replies, “which in my line of work is probably a good thing.”

He gives her another squeeze, and Iris smiles against his shoulder. “Hey Bear?”

“Mmhm?”

“You – um – you wanna come back to mine? After dinner?”

She feels him hesitate and for a moment wonders if she’s misread his enthusiasm, the last few days but – then he’s peeling her off him just enough to look down at her, his expression hopeful. “Yours?”

“Yeah. We can…” Iris shrugs, tries to come up with something that isn’t going to be an obvious euphemism. _Have coffee. Watch Netflix. Fool around on the couch and maybe see each other naked for the first time since kindergarten._

Barry’s smile is tentative but warm. “Sure. Okay. After dinner.”

“After dinner.”

Like a promise.

Iris tugs his collar to pull him down for a kiss – which is exactly the moment when her dad opens the front door, makes a gruff, embarrassed sound and shuffles off back into the house, the faint smell of lasagne wafting out into the evening behind him.

+++  
  
“We have told him we’re dating, right?” Barry murmurs, half an hour of awkwardly benign dinner small talk later.

“Well – it’s not like he wouldn’t know it was coming,” Iris prods him in the ribs with a fork – they’re loading the dishwasher. “How long did he know you had a crush on me? This can’t be a shock.”

“Also, y’know, he has eyes,” Wally is sitting on the kitchen counter, not helping. “And you two are disgusting.”

Iris pokes him in the ribs with the fork for good measure.

+++

“I gotta take my pantyhose off,” Iris tells Barry, after kissing him on her front door step and then in her front room and then up against her closed bedroom door.

It’s admittedly not her best come on – but she figures Barry is not about to let her desire to be rid of some if not all of her underwear deter him from having sex with her, so.

“Okay,” he says, and she has to reach up and wipe her lipstick off his mouth before she giggles at how ridiculous he looks – granted some of that’s her fault, she’s raked his hair sideways and pulled one of the buttons off his shirt in her enthusiasm. He’s exceedingly rumple-able, Barry Allen. “No, wait, where are you going?”

“To the bathroom.”

“You… can’t take them off here?”

“No.” Iris shuts the bathroom door on his precious puppy face, “it’s not dignified. Let me maintain some feminine allure here, Bear.”

“You seriously think me seeing you take your clothes off is going to – what – not turn me on?”

“Not clothes. Pantyhose. Trust me, there’s nothing sexy about taking pantyhose off,” Iris is already peeling the offending garments down her thighs, picking over the material carefully so as not to ladder them – these are the expensive pair she bought specifically for that second movie theatre date so that if Barry were to put his hand up under her skirt any time when they were making out he wouldn’t feel cheap laddered crap. (Not, realistically, that he would have known the difference or cared very much, but Iris would have known and cared a great deal).

“I mean, you could come out here and let me be the judge of that.”

“Two seconds.”

She hears him laugh, and catches her own reflection in the mirror – the dumb look in her eyes, pupils a little blown, sweat-streaked foundation and mascara running some – takes the opportunity to grab a cloth and take the worst of that off, too. She doesn’t want to be distracted by getting the stuff on her good sheets or his clothes whilst they’re – well.

Distractions – she doesn’t want any distractions. She just wants Barry.

When she exits the bathroom, Barry is sitting on the end of her bed. He’s taken his shoes off, and is contemplating his socks – which she knows are the ones she bought him for his birthday last year, with his initials and a little lightning bolt monogrammed on them. They were part of a set with shirts and ties and cufflinks. She’d told him he ought to have some fancy menswear since he was a big grown up superhero now – you never saw Oliver Queen turn up to a function looking less than properly dressed, after all. Barry pretty much only ever wears the socks, though.

His head comes up to look at her and his smile is tentative and warm and she could swear she can hear his heart beat quickening from over here – it’s like there’s something dropping away, or falling into place.

Like – oh, right. _This. Here. Now. Yes. Let’s have this._

Iris climbs into his lap like this isn’t a relatively new thing she does, moving with more confidence than she feels, straddles his thighs, and frames his face with her hands. She feels his fingers rest at her waist – his gaze is gentle and earnest and – awed. Barry Allen is awed by her.

No pressure.

“Iris,” he tells her, and the heat of him through his shirt is sticking to her own skin, “I love you.”

“Yeah I know,” Iris smooths her thumbs along his jaw line, his sweet, familiar face. “I love you too.”

And then she kisses him till she feels light headed and his shaking hands are gripping the back of her dress like he wants to tear it off her. His hands travel further down, and then down again, as she encourages him, and Iris presses herself up against him, the quick, purposeful movement in her hips hard enough to make him catch his breath.

She jerks up against him again and feels his body respond on an atomic level – something sharp going through him like electricity, like lightening –

And then her back hits the mattress, fast enough to take the wind out of her lungs, and Barry’s hand is under her skirt traveling up her bare thigh and oh god she wants to be a lot less dressed than she is –

“Iris,” her name comes out vibrating, half-caught in his flash voice, like he can’t help it, like it’s all he can do to hold the rest of himself still. “Iris.”

He keeps saying her name, whilst he’s pressing his face to her neck, whilst he’s trailing his fingers down her front, whilst she’s fumbling with the buttons on his shirt, whilst he’s pushing her skirt up her thighs, whilst his knuckles are suddenly brushing up against her panties and –

Oh, everything after that starts to get a little fuzzy. But he keeps saying her name.

Somehow they get all their clothes off without ripping anything or tearing any further buttons, and at one point there is a desperate scramble for condoms, which they both have in slightly different varieties and which Barry’s hands are literally vibrating too hard to put on (Iris is also having lots of ideas, by that point, about his vibrating hands).

There is Barry whispering in her ear that she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, and whilst she’s looking at the blood flushed skin on his chest and the little freckles on his shoulders and his delicate eyelashes and his gentle mouth she thinks she could call him beautiful, too.

And then they’re both beautiful – what they do is beautiful, even when it’s awkward and ridiculous and involves some kinda gross bodily fluids – and Iris clings to Barry and presses against him as close as she can get and can feel him moving inside her and never, ever, ever wants to let him go again.


End file.
